A marked register is a copy of the electoral roll that shows who voted.
Copies of the marked register are available for one year after all elections and are available to political parties for a fee. Councils will charge less to supply the data electronically (e.g. as PDFs) than they do for actual paper copies.
Liberal Democrat campaigners use marked registers to inform our campaigning. Knowing whether a person normally votes in local elections or sometimes votes in local elections, is a powerful piece of information when we are targeting our communications, door knocking and campaigning. Similarly knowing which people never vote in elections (there are lots of them), and which people only vote when there is a general election, are important things which will help us campaign more effectively and efficiently.
To do this we need to put the marked registers into Connect. We strongly recommend that you get the marked register for as much of your local authority as you can afford, preferably all of it, for every election. Data in non-target wards or seats may well be useful in the future – if an area becomes a target, or if there is a by-election.
There are two ways the marked register can be entered into Connect:
- Manually – This is by downloading an export from Connect, and manually transferring the data from the sheets you have bought from the Council into the excel document.
We then upload the data into Connect. This is quite a long process, but it is often something that volunteers can help with. - Using Registr. Liberal Democrat volunteers have created a great system where you can upload the PDFs you have bought from the Council, and the data file to upload into Connect is then created for you.
This article (for ALDC members only) sets out more detail about obtaining and entering marked registers and how we can use the information to inform our campaigning.